PALESTINE

Motasem Ahmed Dalloul with the Middle East Monitor was hit in the abdomen by a live round east of Gaza City on Friday while covering a protest, the Committee to Protect Journalists said. Watchdog called for an immediate inquiry into the incident.

"Israeli authorities must investigate the shooting of Dalloul and take all measures to ensure that the media can safely cover protests," CPJ's Middle East and North Africa Program Coordinator Sherif Mansour said.

The use of force by the Israel Defense Force, including live fire, has taken a severe toll on Palestinian journalists, Mansour said.

The Palestinian national movement, which has led the decades-long struggle against Israel's takeover of Palestine, has reached the lowest ebb in its history, according to analysts.

But as Palestinians mark this week the 70th anniversary of the Nakba, the "Catastrophe" that followed the dispossession of their homeland and the creation of Israel in its place, there are signs of possible change.

For more than a quarter of a century, the Palestinian movement has been split into two increasingly irreconcilable ideological factions, Fatah and Hamas - now reflected in a profound geographical division between their respective strongholds of the occupied West Bank and Gaza.

Haaretz's report about messages Hamas is indirectly sending Israel about its willingness to consider a long-term cease-fire in Gaza won’t spur the Netanyahu government to a quick diplomatic response.

As things seem at the moment, an exit strategy has yet to be found that will permit a reduction of tensions along the Gaza fence ahead of the huge demonstrations Hamas plans for Nakba Day on May 15. Without indirect negotiations or a willingness to consider significant relief for the Strip by Israel or Egypt, it will be hard to prevent a mass event May 15 that could lead to many deaths.

The sewage treatment plant in Wadi Gaza has not been running properly in the past few years. The large fans that are required during the first phase of sewage treatment have been prevented from operating normally due to electricity shortages.

These shortages have been imposed by Israel and, during 2017, were exacerbated when the Fatah-led Palestinian Authority in the occupied West Bank declined to pay bills for Gaza’s energy amid a row with its rival Hamas.

With treatment made impossible, raw sewage has been flowing through Wadi Gaza towards the sea.

Some UK politicians are getting fed up with Israel’s disregard for international law on the rights of children. 6 years after a damning report on “Israel’s widespread and systematic ill-treatment of Palestinian child detainees,” next to nothing had improved, and Israel refused an additional follow-up visit.

But even as some are calling for tough measures, the UK voted against a resolution on Israeli accountability at the UN Human Rights Council last March.

Supporters of Israel among Britain’s ruling elite tend to recite mantras about the two nations sharing the same values.

If theft and plunder were regarded as values, the mantras would have a ring of truth to them.

Expecting full honesty and transparency from Theresa May’s government would, however, not be realistic. So it comes as little surprise that one of her cabinet colleagues has wished Israel a happy 70th birthday, while trumpeting its commitment to “justice, compassion, tolerance.”

The greeting – from Gavin Williamson, Britain’s defense secretary – was delivered at a time when unarmed protesters were being massacred in Gaza.

The Israeli government is encouraging its supporters to engage in a cyberbullying campaign against US students after they voted to divest from companies that profit from Israel’s crimes.

Administrators of the Act.IL app began directing its users to “like” and share a Facebook page that was set up solely to threaten and bully student senators of George Washington University in Washington, DC, who had recently voted in support of the resolution.

The Facebook page smeared the divestment campaign as “anti-Semitic.”

The Act.IL app is the product of a partnership between Israeli think tanks, lobby groups and Israel’s Ministry of Strategic Affairs, which poured nearly $600,000 into the project, according to revealed documents.

I wonder how many people, not just Americans but those in other countries, have come to the conclusion that the United States today is a less free and less aware society than the societies in the dystopian novels of the 20th century or in movies such as The Matrix and V for Vendetta. Just as people in the dystopian novels had no idea of their real situation, few Americans do either.

What are we to make of the extraordinary war crimes committed by the United States in the 21st century that have destroyed in whole or part seven countries, resulting in millions of dead, maimed, orphaned, and displaced peoples? Consider, for example, the latest Washington war crime, the illegal attack on Syria. Instead of protesting this illegality, the American media egged it on, cheering impending death and destruction.

Canada remains silent while Israeli snipers continue to murder Palestinian children. Canada remains silent while Israeli snipers continue to shoot Palestinian children in the head and legs with "butterfly" bullets - meant to kill instantly and disfigure irrevocably - for waving Palestinian flags on what remains of Palestinian soil.

Canada remains silent while Israeli snipers continue to execute Palestinian journalists wearing vests marked "PRESS" as they record droves of Palestinians being wantonly murdered and maimed again and again and again.

Canada remains silent while Israeli snipers continue to target and gas thousands of Palestinian children, women and men for defending their dignity, sovereignty, and humanity during peaceful demonstrations on Palestinian soil since the Great March of Return began on March 30.

When the settlement of Ariel established a cemetery, Zubeidi knew life would only become worse for Palestinian communities. Ariel was founded in 1978 and has grown into one of the largest settlements in the West Bank, with some 19,000 residents.

The cemetery was established about two years ago. While the area of the cemetery consists of less than two acres of land, its emotional ramifications on neighboring Palestinians have been profound.

“It’s a direct threat to our future,” Zubeidi told Mondoweiss. “It shows us that the settlers are going to stay. They will never leave our lands, because now even their dead are buried here.”

Dozens of Israeli soldiers invaded, Wednesday, the homes of two Palestinians siblings in Hebron, in the southern part of the occupied West Bank, violently searched them and stole 20.000 Shekels, the WAFA Palestinian News Agency has reported.

The soldiers invaded the homes of Abdul-Karim Rashid Abu Ramouz, and his brother, Ahmad, and violently searched them, causing damage, before stealing 20.000 shekels, without giving the families any warrants or documentation.

The soldiers also invaded and searched the homes of Abdullah Sallal, from Bani Neim town, east of Hebron, and Atef Ali Rabba’, from Yatta, south of the city.

Israeli soldiers abducted, on Wednesday at dawn, at least fourteen Palestinians from their homes, after invading and violently searching them, in several parts of the occupied West Bank. The soldiers also caused fire in olive orchards and wheat fields.

Media sources in Nablus, in the northern part of the occupied West Bank, said the soldiers abducted four Palestinians, identified as Bader-Eddin Ahmad Hamadna, Omar Dirar Jarar’a, Bara’ Issam Jarar’a and Mohammad Omar Shouli, from their homes in ‘Aseera ash-Shamaliya town, north of the city.

Israeli snipers have been shooting Palestinian protesters within the Gaza Strip, claiming that, in doing so, they are protecting Israel’s borders and sovereignty. Is their claim genuine?

Since 30 March, hundreds of Israeli soldiers, including a reported 100 snipers stationed along the eastern border of the Gaza Strip, have been shooting at unarmed Palestinian protesters who are taking part in the activities of the Great March of Return and Breaking the Siege. According to the Ministry of Health in Gaza, they have killed 46 protesters and wounded around 8,000 others, including 25 who have had at least one of their limbs amputated.

The snipers have been shooting mercilessly at Palestinian women, children and men, young and old alike, with no consideration for international laws and conventions. They completely ignore calls for them to stop their brutal crackdown on the 2 million people besieged in the tiny coastal enclave.

Head of International Committee of Red Cross (ICRC) sub-delegation in Gaza, Gilan Devorn, has called on Israeli occupation authorities to respect and ensure the unimpeded functioning of medical services for the wounded and sick.

In a statement on Saturday, Devorn expressed his deep regret over an incident in which a medic from the Red Crescent was wounded by Israeli fire while performing his work in the north of the Gaza Strip.

“Today, a medic at the Palestinian Red Crescent Society was shot while he was evacuating a wounded man in the border area. We look into the circumstances surrounding the incident, but the medic was clearly visible, wearing the Palestinian Red Crescent vest standing near the ambulance. Such incidents must stop,” he said, according to Al Ray Palestinian Media Agency.

Israeli settlers, Tuesday, dumped wastewater into an agricultural land belonging to a Palestinian family in the town of Beit Ummar, to the north of the southern West Bank city of Hebron, said a local official.

Yousef Abu Maria, an anti-settlement activist in the town, told WAFA that settlers from the nearby illegal Israeli settlement of Gush Etzion dumped waste water into an agricultural land planted with grapes, to the north of the town, in an attempt to force the Palestinians to abandon their land as a prelude to seize it for the benefit of settlement expansion.

Both Trump and Netanyahu paint Iran as the most dangerous terrorist state in the world. Really? It wasn't the Iranian regime that illegally cost over one million Iraqi civilian lives and blew that country apart ... So who is the aggressor here? Unlike Israel's many invasions and military incursions, Iran, a poor country, has not invaded any country for over 250 years. Iraq's dictator invaded Iran in 1980, with U.S. backing, costing Iran an estimated 500,000 lives. No country, save the U.S. Empire, has the chutzpah that Netanyahu possesses because he knows the U.S. government and the mass media will embrace his expanding push for U.S. militarism in the Middle East.

A protest by 200 activists delayed the start of the fourth stage of the Giro d’Italia in the Sicilian city of Catania on Tuesday.

The activists had planned to shut the prestigious cycling race down altogether to protest how it had been launched in Israel last week, but they were confronted and kettled by riot police, as the video above shows.

As members of the Israeli government-backed Israeli team went past, protesters threw out flyers and carried banners with slogans including, “Israel kills, Italy is an accomplice.”

“We made everyone hear our dissent against the exploitation of sport by a state that has for decades practiced apartheid against the Palestinians and which does not respect UN resolutions regarding occupied territories,” protest organizers said, according to an early version of a report from the newspaper La Sicilia.

Yesterday kicked off a two day diplomatic visit between the leaders of Venezuela and Palestine.

The first item on the agenda was the signing of an agreement to create a bi-national bank to fund infrastructure, technology, and industry between the two countries.

Additionally, a business council spanning economic and financial matters was agreed upon.

The bank will be started off with 20 million Venezuelan Petros.

As Reported by Telesur

Newly re-elected Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas landed in Caracas last night for a two-day diplomatic stay in Venezuela and already he and President Nicolas Maduro have signed an accord to create the binational bank to fund technological and industrial initiatives between the two countries.

During the same meeting Venezuelan minister of tourism Marlenys Contreras and Palestinian director general of international cooperation, Imad Zuhairi agreed to bilateral tourism and hotel projects.

Webmaster's Commentary:

This will be good for both countries; that is, unless the U,S and/or Israel, finds a way to crush/sanction the deal to death.

“In the past, the sea used to be open. We would fish whatever we wanted, whenever we wanted,” Rashad al-Hissi, a 74-year-old Gaza fisher, told The Electronic Intifada.

According to the 1993 Oslo accords, Gaza’s fishing zone was supposed to extend 20 nautical miles out from shore. But Israel never allowed local fishers that range.

The furthest Gaza’s fishers have been able to work since then has been 12 miles out, and that was more than a decade ago. Since Hamas won elections and took control of Gaza’s internal affairs in 2007, the limits were reduced to six miles, then three before being raised again to six, the limit fishers face today.

In a healthy society truth doesn’t need a ‘movement’. In a society with a prospect of a future, truth is explored and celebrated in the open.

In the coming USA visit I will delve into the strategies that are set to deviate us from truth and truthfulness. We will learn how false dichotomies are manufactured and the means by which detachment and alienation are sustained. We will look primarily at Palestine and Neocon Wars.

Like the Palestinians we are not allowed to utter the name of our oppressor nor can we discuss the means that facilitate this oppression. Truth is our first step towards emancipation. By now, we are all Palestinians.

The scenes at the emergency entrances at Gaza's hospitals are not for the faint-hearted. They have been especially dreadful on Fridays when the number of injured protesters participating in the Great March Return intensifies at the Gaza-Israeli border.

Wailing ambulances rush into hospital emergency gates and bloody casualties who were given quick first aid treatment are pulled out of the vehicles, each person hoping to be saved and not fall victim to Gaza's poorly equipped hospitals.

“It was the worst scene ever when we were pushed out [by Zionist forces]. Only God knows how much I cried.” A Nakba survivor, 86-year-old Ibrahim lived through displacement in 1948 and now lives in Jalazone Refugee camp yearning to return to his land.

Yair Netanyahu, a son of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is said to be teaching tourists geopolitics and explaining causes behind the Middle Eastern conflict, a move that is considered controversial by local tourist firms, Haaretz reported.

Tour guides in Israel have been recently sent offers from an agency that organizes excursions to include a lecture on geopolitics into their customers' program.

Lectures, devoted to the long-lasting conflict between the Israelis and Palestinians, are being reportedly offered by the elder son of the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Yair Netanyahu, who took up the job a few weeks ago.

According to the media outlet, the news has caused controversial reactions among tour guides some of whom expressed their surprise in private messages and said that the young man lacks qualification for that position.

Thousands of Palestinians staged a sixth weekly protest Friday near Gaza's border with Israel, some burning tires and throwing stones as Israeli soldiers fired live bullets and volleys of tear gas, injuring dozens of people.

Small Israeli drones faced off against Gaza kites with burning rags attached to them, according to witnesses. In recent weeks, Gaza protesters had sent some of these kites across the border as part of a new tactic of setting dry wheat fields on the Israeli side on fire.

On Friday, Israeli drones took down two kites in one location, while stone-throwers with slingshots sent two low-flying drones crashing in another area, witnesses said. The Israeli military said two small surveillance drones fell into Gaza, but did not elaborate.

The military said that in one area, protesters tried to damage the fence and enter Israel but withdrew when soldiers arrived. In another location, soldiers warned over loudspeakers that those burning tires would be targeted.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, President Trump’s new top diplomat, this week supported Israel’s handling of the protests.

“We do believe that Israelis have the right to defend themselves, and we’re fully supportive of that,” Pompeo said Monday in Jordan.

The European Parliament condemned Hamas “for instigating violence and for its terrorist activities on the Israel-Gaza border.” Parliament members also urged Israel and Palestinians “to use non-violent means and respect human rights.”
Note: No mention here of the over 50 United Nations violations or the ILLEGAL 60 occupation of Palestine! Aren't you getting tired of hearing "Israel has a right to defend itself....and it has no borders!

Gaza Health Ministry: Three wounded protesters in critical condition ? IDF says protesters tried to breach border ? 45 killed since protests started six weeks ago
The heartbreaking reason this Palestinian joined the Gaza border protests
Israel to top court: Gaza protests are state of war, human rights law doesn't apply
Gazan teen shot in protests dies of wounds; Israel shoots Palestinian for trying to damage border fence
Note: The brave Israeli Defense Forces murdering unarmed woman and children with weapons provided by the United States of Israel!

It is puzzling to witness the speed and ferocity with which Britain is deteriorating into an Orwellian nightmare.

The Evening Standard reported last month that “a London council worker has been suspended after being caught claiming Zionists ‘collaborated’ with the Nazis”.

Stan Keable was removed from his duties as an environmental enforcement officer for Hammersmith and Fulham Council after saying, “The Nazis were anti-Semitic. The problem I’ve got is the Zionist government at the time collaborated with them. They accepted the ideas that Jews are not acceptable here.”...>>

Nauert started her Thursday briefing by praising the State Department press pool and urging accountability for the "apparent assassination" of a BBC journalist in Afghanistan on Monday (one of the nine that were killed in that attack). She then profusely condemned the many violations of journalists' rights across the world. Among the perpetrators, she listed Myanmar, Egypt, Turkey, Tanzania, Cambodia, the Philippines, Malta, Mexico and, of course, China and Russia. All of them were chastised as oppressive governments that repress, detain or outright murder unwanted journalists.

Once Nauert was done with her opening speech (which included congratulating one of the journalists present on her promotion and praising another's dress choice), she moved on to other topics – but was pulled back on track by the first reporter to ask a question:

"Would you also condemn the recent deaths of journalists, Palestinian journalists in the Gaza Strip?"

Another Friday of mass demonstrations in Gaza’s Great March of Return means another effort by the New York Times to distort the truth — and today’s article shows the usual dishonest contortions.

The Times report is mainly about an effort by some of the the Gazan marchers to set kites on fire, and fly them over the border to ignite fields on the Israeli side — what the Times calls a “battle plan” — that failed because the winds blew in the wrong direction. Fully 21 paragraphs of the article are about the dangerous kites, as are all three photos in both the online and print editions.

But you have to wait until the 7th paragraph to learn that the Israeli army continued yesterday to use its “battle plan” — by firing live ammunition at the Palestinians, wounding 121 of the protesters. There are no photographs of the Israeli snipers or of the wounded Palestinians.

Israeli occupation soldiers have wounded around 8,000 unarmed Palestinians taking part in the Great March of Return activities along the eastern border of the Gaza Strip, local medical sources have revealed.

According to the Ministry of Health in Gaza, the Israeli troops had wounded 6,793 protesters by Thursday, including 24 who have each had one of their limbs amputated as a direct result of their injuries. On Friday evening, ministry spokesman Ashraf Al-Qidra announced that a further 1,143 protesters had been wounded, bringing the total since 30 March to 7,936. With no fatalities recorded on Friday, the total of those killed by the Israelis since the end of March stands at 45.

The number of British MPs from both the Labour and Conservative parties who appear to be concerned about the education of Palestinian children should be heart-warming. However, the focus of their concern is not about the Israeli snipers who appear to use the children as target practice, nor Tel Aviv’s policies which result in the bulldozing of entire schools; nor, indeed, the many military checkpoints that pupils have to navigate in order to reach their classrooms.

The MPs I’m talking about use every available opportunity to grill the Department for International Development (DfID) and any other organisation over any education aid for Palestine. On each and every occasion that a question is asked in parliament by one or more of these MPs, specifically on education, a government minister will assure them that the money does not fund terrorism, nor does it go towards funding “incitement”.

Dozens of Palestinians were wounded Friday as thousands demonstrated on the Gaza border for the sixth week in a row in a wave of protests that has already seen nearly 50 people killed by Israeli fire.

Medics treated 170 demonstrators for gunshot wounds and tear gas, with 69 taken to hospital, a spokesman for the Gaza health ministry said.

Black smoke billowed over a protest camp east of Gaza City where Palestinians were burning tyres and flying kites, at least one carrying a Molotov cocktail intended on setting fire to nearby Israeli fields.

After advancing toward the border fence, protesters would retreat when the Israeli army fired tear gas.

Medics on the ground say Israeli forces are shooting at demonstrators with a new type of round - never seen before - known as the "butterfly bullet", which explodes upon impact, pulverizing tissue, arteries and bone, while causing severe internal injuries.

All 24 amputees were shot with a single explosive bullet, including journalists Yaser Murtaja and Ahmad Abu Hussein who succumbed to their wounds after being shot in the abdomen.

In response to a High Court petition, Israeli authorities said the country’s government regards recent demonstrations by Palestinians along the Gaza fence line as a “state of war” and that the state of Israel opposes the application of human rights law during an armed conflict.

Israeli state attorneys on Sunday defended the army's use of live ammunition during clashes with Palestinian protesters along the Gaza Strip's eastern fence.

They said human rights laws are not applicable to the ongoing protests, which they argued cannot be considered civilian events. Thus, they said Israeli forces acted in line with both Israeli and international law in killing and wounding dozens of protesters, Haaretz reported Thursday.

The Council on International Relations, a Gaza-based NGO, issued an invitation yesterday to New York Senator Chuck Schumer to come to Gaza so that he can see that he and the Palestinian community share many attributes, from humble origins to a high value for education. The group said it is confident that Schumer would call for an end to the blockade, as Senator Bernie Sanders has done, if he only observed the “inhuman” Palestinian conditions there.

Schumer has had nothing to say about Israel’s killings in Gaza, despite pressure from young Jewish progressives.

Israeli soldiers invaded, on Friday at dawn, Palestinian homes in Hebron, in the southern part of the occupied West Bank, and fractured the arm of a woman who tried to prevent them from abducting her son.

Media sources in Hebron said the soldiers invaded the home of Bassam Abu Aisha in Jabal Abu Rumman area, in Hebron city, violently searched the property causing excessive damage, and assaulted his wife who tried to prevent them from abducting her son, Sa’ed, 27.

The sources added that the woman suffered fractures in one of her arms, in addition to causing various cuts and bruises, before abducting her son.

The Automobile Importers Association in the Gaza Strip said yesterday that Israeli occupation authorities have stopped allowing cars into the besieged enclave, Turkey’s Anadolu Agency reported.

The association said in a statement that the Palestinian Ministry of Transport and Communications in the city of Ramallah confirmed that Israel has stopped “allowing cars in to Gaza without giving any reasons”.

The association explained that about 88 vehicles were currently stationed at the Israeli controlled Erez (Beit Hanoun) crossing, waiting to enter Gaza ahead of the Jewish holidays.

“We initially thought that the cars were not ready to enter due to security checks, but after an inquiry from the Ministry of Transport and Communications in Ramallah, they confirmed that the entry was stopped without mentioning the reasons,” the statement said.

Israeli settlers attacked Palestinians in the West Bank village of ‘Einabus with the assistance of Israeli soldiers, according to a new report by human rights NGO B’Tselem.

On the morning of 6 March, two Palestinians – ‘Ahed Hamad and Yasser Hamad – went to the northern part of the village to pave a road intended to help residents access their farmland.

Shortly after they began work, some 30 Israeli settlers, “some of them masked”, arrived from the direction of the notorious Yitzhar settlement, located some four kilometres away.

“The settlers surrounded the bulldozer and began throwing stones at it, breaking the windshield,” stated B’Tselem. “The two men tried to escape, but some of the settlers pursued them, throwing stones and hitting them, until they managed to escape into the village.”

Thirty-three Palestinians were fatally injured by Israeli occupation forces and armed civilians during the month of April. Four others died of injuries sustained the previous month.

All but three of them were killed in Gaza as Israel continued its lethal crackdown on the Great March of Return protests. Fifty-one Palestinians in Gaza have been killed since the outset of the protests on 30 March.

No Israelis were killed by Palestinians during the month of April, and no Israeli injuries have been reported as a result of the Great March of Return protests.

Three more Palestinians were killed and 611 wounded last Friday, when tens of thousands of Gazans continued their largely non-violent protests at the Gaza-Israel border.

Yet as the casualty count keeps climbing – nearly 45 dead and over 5,500 wounded – the deafening silence also continues. Tellingly, many of those who long chastised Palestinians for using armed resistance against the Israeli occupation are nowhere to be found, while children, journalists, women and men are all targeted by hundreds of Israeli snipers who dot the Gaza border.

Israeli officials are adamant. The likes of Defense Minister, Avigdor Lieberman, perceives his war against the unarmed protesters as a war on terrorists. He believes that “there are no innocents in Gaza.” While the Israeli mindset is not in the least surprising, it is emboldened by the lack of meaningful action, or outright international silence to the atrocities taking place at the border.

Yousef Kronz was sitting on the ground well within Israel’s designated “safe zone,” wearing a Press vest, taking photos. When he stood up, he was shot in both legs by two different snipers. Another young man ran to help him, only to be shot in the leg as well. Adding insult to injury, Israel refused him passage to the West Bank for treatment that would have saved at least one of his legs.

Israel advocates might consider it “restraint” that these young men weren’t shot in the head, but the question hangs in the air: why was this life-changing horror inflicted on Yousef – and thousands of others – as they did nothing more scandalous than carry flags run around, pray, demonstrate, or take photos in the shadow of Israel’s violent oppression?

Last year, 54 Palestinians died waiting for Israeli permits to leave the occupied Gaza Strip for medical treatment.

Most of them were cancer patients.

Arguably, the one person most responsible for this horrifying toll is Israeli general Yoav Mordechai, the head of COGAT, the bureaucratic arm of Israel’s military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

That makes him in effect the military ruler of millions of Palestinians.

Israeli police planned to teach children how to shoot at Palestinians as part of a training exercise in a school.

The incident in the Menashe Regional Council, near Haifa in northern present-day Israel, was brought to light in recent days when Palestinian citizens of Israel took photos of what was happening.

Jamal Zahalka, a member of the Israeli parliament from the Joint Arab List, is demanding an investigation into the training sponsored by the Israeli police and the education ministry, which he said “prepares students psychologically to kill Arabs.”

One photo shows a person – most of their body blurred with a black marker – using a paintball gun to fire at cutouts of men and women wearing checkered kuffiyeh headscarves that are associated with Palestinians.

Zahalka made his demand in a letter to public security minister Gilad Erdan, according to the publication Arab48.

The accusation follows Mahmoud Abbas’ remark that Jews were persecuted during World War II because they dealt with loans and not religion being the root of anti-Semitism.

"It would appear that, once a Holocaust denier, always a Holocaust denier," Netanyahu said on Twitter. "I call upon the international community to condemn the grave anti-Semitism of Abu Mazen (Abbas), which should have long since passed from this world."

The United States Ambassador to Israel David M. Friedman responded sharply to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas's caustic speech delivered to a meeting of the Palestinian National Council in Ramallah on Monday.

Abbas claimed that European Jews had been massacred over the centuries because of their "social behavior related to interests and banks," a common antisemitic trope, and repeated the widely disavowed theory that Ashkenazi Jews are descended from the medieval Khazar converts to Judaism, and not ancient Hebrews, among other statements.

The European Union's foreign service condemned remarks on the Holocaust by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas as "unacceptable," echoing criticism on Wednesday by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

In strikingly blunt language from Brussels, the European External Action Service said in a statement: "The speech Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas delivered on 30 April contained unacceptable remarks concerning the origins of the Holocaust and Israel's legitimacy.

"Such rhetoric will only play into the hands of those who do not want a two-state solution, which President Abbas has repeatedly advocated."

illage of Al-Issawia (East Jerusalem) early this morning. The genocidal forces of the terrorist Israeli occupation destroyed one of the residential buildings in the village. The building structure also contained a dry cleaning business and a pizzeria that served Palestinian residents. After demolishing this dwelling, the owner will be forced to pay for the demolition or face prison time

The 30,000 people participating in the Great March -- many of them refugees as the Nakba continues -- are gathered near the Gaza border to assert their UN-guaranteed right to return to their homes. They also are protesting 11 years of blockade and siege, during which Israel has killed more than 3,700 people, injured over 17,000 and decimated Gaza's infrastructure.

I experienced the ripple effects of the Israeli Army's crackdown on Palestinian protesters firsthand this month during my two-week residency at the Al-Quds University English Department in Abu Dis, a suburb of occupied Jerusalem.

A “senior officer” told Haaretz reporter ‘Amos Harel that most Gazans killed by the IDF since March 30th were killed accidentally, claiming that IDF snipers were aiming to wound them but that the protesters either bent down just as the sniper was pulling the trigger or were killed by shrapnel from the ground.

This claim directly contradicts IDF’s official statement of 31st March, in which the army claimed that “nothing was carried out uncontrolled, everything was accurate and measured, and we know where every bullet landed.” The IDF later deleted the statement, presumably because of the legal culpability it carries, but a screen capture was taken in time.

Last Saturday, the New York Times reported, in a front page article on the fifth weekly Gaza protest against Israel’s continuing violation of their right to return to their ancestral homes, now occupied by Israel, that Israeli soldiers had shot to death three men who had breached a barbed wire fence on Palestinian land near Israel’s Gaza fence. Their weapons had been “wire cutters, hooks and winches.”

In addition to the three deaths, IDF soldiers also reportedly injured nearly 1,000 protesters, of a total estimated by the IDF as between 12,000 to 14,000. The IDF asserted: “‘This is not a peaceful demonstration… They’re trying to infiltrate into Israel, damage our infrastructure and kill Israelis.'”

The attack came before dawn prayers. Israeli settlers slipped unseen into the northern occupied West Bank village of Aqraba, broke down the door to the village's mosque, and set the building on fire.

Before fleeing, they used red paint to spray the words "price tag" and "revenge" on the outside walls of the mosque.

A week after the 13 April attack, Palestinians in the Ramallah-area village of Burqa woke up to find the tyres of dozens of cars slashed and racist anti-Arab graffiti sprayed on the walls of homes and shops and on car doors.

Three days on, the words "death to Arabs" were sprayed across the Jerusalem-area West Bank village of Beit Iksa.

These are just three of the most recent crimes by fundamentalist illegal settlers, who began the attacks in 2008 as the "price tag" for the removal of illegal outposts in the West Bank.

But the hosts on the “Breakfast Club” radio show on the Maariv channel 103 FM went further. Host Shai Goldstein said that he “feels like killing that woman”, and called her “stupid”, “retarded”, “little bitch”, and “filth.” His co-host Lea Lev echoed his views.

I mentioned the reaction before, but I’ve now transcribed the entire conversation because it is so hair-raising. Maariv is the 3rd largest news outlet in Israel, and is considered mainstream and centrist.

“In our time,” wrote George Orwell in 1946, “political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible.” British colonialism, the Soviet gulag and America’s dropping of an atomic bomb, he argued, “can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face.” So how do people defend the indefensible? Through “euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness.” By obscuring the truth.

So it is, more than 70 years later, with Israeli policy toward the Gaza Strip. The truth is too brutal to honestly defend. Why are thousands of Palestinians risking their lives by running toward the Israeli snipers who guard the fence that encloses Gaza? Because Gaza is becoming uninhabitable. That’s not hyperbole. The United Nations says that Gaza will be “unlivable” by 2020, maybe sooner.

Israeli occupation authorities decided, on Sunday, to strip four Jerusalemite MPs of their permanent residency, under the pretext of not being loyal to Israel.

Lawyer Fadi al-Qawasmi said that Israeli Interior Minister Aryeh Deri decided to revoke the residency of MPs Mohammed Abu Tir, Ahmad Attoun, and Mohammed Toutah, as well as that of the former Minister of Jerusalem Affairs, Khaled abu-Arafa.

Israel was founded on the infamous fallacy of “a land without a people for a people without a land.” Israel’s attempt to persuade the world that this was a valid premise for statehood has been a colossal failure, even among a growing number of Jews worldwide. Given the fact that historical [British-mandated] Palestine was inhabited prior to Israel’s creation, Israel has gone to great lengths, at huge costs, to bury this racist fallacy.

The state of South Carolina will become the first state in the nation to legislate a definition of anti-Semitism that considers certain criticisms of the Israeli government to be hate speech. The language, which was inserted into the state’s recently passed $8 billion budget, offers a much more vague definition of anti-Semitism that some suggest specifically targets the presence of the global boycott, divestment and sanctions, or BDS, movement on state college campuses. The law requires that all state institutions, including state universities, apply the revised definition when deciding whether an act violates anti-discrimination policies.

Unarmed civilians in the Gaza Strip have held rallies to mark Land Day. The protests were met with fatal force from Israeli troops. The killings of Palestinians have sparked an international debate about Israel’s atrocities. This is how world media have discussed the developments.

Israeli occupation forces shot and wounded 30 Palestinian athletes in the besieged Gaza Strip since the start of the “Great March of Return” on 30 March, the Palestinian Ministry of Youth and Sport revealed yesterday.

Several were shot in the head and were in a critical condition, the ministry added.

“A number of the wounded had their lower limbs amputated such as Alaa Al-Dali who was preparing to represent Palestinian in the Asia tournament.”

In addition, he said that the footballer Mohamed Obaid was shot in both of his feet and is suffering severe damage in one of his knees.

Amnesty International has renewed its call for an arms embargo to be imposed on Israel after soldiers responded violently to unarmed protesters on the Gaza border.

Some 45 Palestinians have been killed in the past five weeks of demonstrations as part of the Great March or Return, three of whom died in separate incidents yesterday as they continued to protest at different areas of the border. Some 5,511 others, including at least 592 children have been wounded in what Amnesty called a “disproportionate response” to Gazans calling for their collective right to return to their homeland.

“The time for symbolic statements of condemnation is now over. The international community must act concretely and stop the delivery of arms and military equipment to Israel,” Magdalena Mughrabi, Amnesty’s deputy regional director for the Middle East and North Africa, said in a statement.

The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has recorded a steady increase in Israeli violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, in comparison to previous years.

OCHA documented, in a report, that Israeli violence has increased since the begging of 2018, the weekly average of settler attacks that resulted in injuries among Palestinians or damage to Palestinian property is five, compared with an average of three attacks in 2017 and two attacks in 2016.

The report noted that, during the last two weeks, three Palestinians were injured in settler attacks, and recorded 11 attacks against Palestinian properties in West Bank.

Israel is carrying out a murderous assault against protesting Palestinians, with its armed forces killing and maiming demonstrators who pose no imminent threat to them, Amnesty International revealed today, based on its latest research, as the “Great March of Return” protests continued in the Gaza Strip.

The Israeli military has killed 35 Palestinians and injured more than 5,500 others – some with what appear to be deliberately inflicted life-changing injuries – during the weekly Friday protests that began on 30 March.

Amnesty International has renewed its call on governments worldwide to impose a comprehensive arms embargo on Israel following the country’s disproportionate response to mass demonstrations along the fence that separates the Gaza Strip from Israel.

Israeli construction teams are hard at work as cranes lift and lower building materials on the hilltops, expanding Ariel University - the first settler university established in the occupied West Bank - and the Ariel West industrial zone.

The seemingly untouched hills of olive trees create a picturesque view for the some 65,000 settlers residing in 24 illegal Israeli settlements scattered across the district.

This reality, however, has only been made possible through the relentless expulsion of Palestinians from their lands, as each Israeli development begets Palestinian loss, according to locals.

Most recently, Israel announced plans to construct the first train line for Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank, connecting the Ariel settlement - one of Israel's largest settlements with a population close to 19,000 - to cities and towns inside Israel.

The parents of Palestinian teen, Mohammed Abu Khdeir who was brutally tortured and burned to death by Israeli settlers in July, 2014 have filed a civil lawsuit for 5.6 million Israeli shekel ($1.6 million) in damages.

“The goal is not to make money but to add to their punishment, so that even when they are released they will know they need to pay the family they hurt so much” Israeli Haaretz newspaper quoted family lawyer, Muhannad Jabara as saying.

In an interview with Quds Press, Hussein Abu Khdeir, Mohammed’s father said “this is not compensation because we do not want to trade in our son’s case. We know that we will not get money and our cause is not finished with Mohammed’s death, but we will continue our legal fighting even if we reach international court”.

I wrote the first version of the article below regarding a Palestinian “sense of place” for Counterpunch in 2006 and sent it out also in a 2016 Justice Initiative posting. Yet, given the intensity of struggles and the ongoing Israeli violence against the Palestinians, I am sending out an edited version. Land and the struggles for indigenous integrity are hugely important all over the world. Those of us of European descent (which includes many Israelis) have much to atone for over the centuries regarding grabbing land from others as well as grabbing people to enslave them and the struggles and reverberations of it all are on-going. The impact of abusive and arrogant behavior is seemingly endless particularly when the efforts for reconciliation, reparations, justice and peace are not taken seriously.

Former Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul-Gheit has for the first time confirmed that Israel has on numerous times requested land swaps in an effort to resolve the Palestine-Israel conflict, Arabi21 reported yesterday.

Aboul-Gheit, who is currently the secretary of the Arab League, revealed he witnessed the land swap request that was repeated four times. He did not say who else requested the land swap.

“There were some illusions between 2003 and 2006,” he said, while giving a speech for the Egyptian army marking the liberation of Sinai. “I was a witness to these requests when I was a foreign minister. They said: Let’s exchange lands with you.”

U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said Monday that a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict remains a priority for the Trump administration, despite its recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital and its planned move of the U.S. Embassy to the holy city over Palestinian protests. Pompeo also said the U.S. is "fully supportive" of the Jewish state's right to defend itself and declined to criticize the Israeli military for its use of live fire against Palestinian protesters along the Gaza border.

Israel says that it is defending its sovereign border, including nearby communities, and that its troops target only instigators. Israel accuses Hamas, which is sworn to Israel's destruction, of trying to carry out attacks under the guise of the mass protests.
Note: Israel has no legal sovereign and it is Israel who is doing the destruction of Palestine.

On April 25, Ahmad Abu Hussein became the second Palestinian journalist Israeli snipers shot to death while covering the Great March of Return demonstrations, a series of weekly, massive Palestinian demonstrations demanding the right to return to their lands. Abu Hussein was 24 years old. Just days before, Israeli live ammunition killed 30-year-old Yasser Mourtaja. Like Abu Hussein, he was wearing a large, bright “Press” jacket that made clear he was a reporter.

The organization Reporters Sans Frontieres asserts that the Israeli Occupying Forces’ targeting of journalists is deliberate and systemic. This would be in direct violation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2222 (2015), which states: “impunity for crimes committed against journalists, media professionals and associated personnel in armed conflict remains a significant challenge to their protection and that ensuring accountability for crimes committed against them is a key element in preventing future attacks.”

Israel’s right-wing Yisrael Beiteinu, led by Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman, is pushing for a new law to punish those who document the Israeli soldiers activities during their army service, Israeli Channel 7 reported.

The draft law calls for anyone who films soldiers during their military service to be handed a -year jail term which would increase to ten years if the content is classified as “detrimental to Israeli security”.

The bill also prohibits the publication of video recordings on social media or disseminating them to the media.

"Israel has in fact celebrated seven decades of plunder, oppression and impunity. The voices of peace in Israel, from people like David Grossman, Uri Avnery and Gideon Levi, are fading. Israel, as Rosner attests, is a Jewish State. Israelis choose to bond with their “Jewish identity”. Peace and reconciliation are not something we should expect to see any time soon.">>

Israeli human rights activists who promote BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) and speak harshly against Israeli policy are often subject to campaigns of exclusion and sometimes to death threats. While their stories pale in comparison to the stories of Palestinians (who are often shot dead just for protesting their rights), they need to be told and heard once in a while.

Thus I will tell the story of Adi Shosberger, the Israeli activist who called Israeli soldiers “terrorists” who are participating in a “massacre of innocent civilians”, telling them they were brainwashed into joining a “terror army”, as featured in a video which went viral in Israel just over two weeks ago. The incitement against her following the video release resulted in death threats, harassment and intimidation of her children, slashing of tires, garbage on the lawn etc. Adi required protection from fellow activists, as the police have taken her situation very lightly.